Claiming belonging,constructing social spaces: Citizenship practices in an Afro-Bolivian town

Introduction

Much recent ethnographic literature has moved away from conceptions of citizenship as a status conferred on members of a national community as presented by authors such as Marshall (1950). Rather than analyse the rights and responsibilities that accompany citizenship status, these more recent studies examine practices associated with belonging to political communities in a variety of local contexts. Many authors examine the role of national and local languages of citizenship in the production particular kinds of subjects. Stack (2012, 2013) describes citizenship as a language for describing how to live together in a local community in Mexican towns where a tradition of municipal – rather than national – belonging carries a particular significance. Lazar (2013) identifies discourses of ‘containment’ in Argentine trade unions, which at once allow members to feel part of the organisation, while simultaneously channelling and directing emotional excesses and political discontent. Nuijten (2013) argues that a discourse of citizenship may vary depending on the position of the speaker. Implementers of slum-upgrading projects in Brazil emphasise the obligations that accompany full inclusion of marginal slum dwellers into a national community and encourage them to engage directly with the state, while beneficiaries speak in terms of intermediaries, patronage, reciprocity and gifts.

Other works have focused on the intersection between specific legal and institutional regimes and the production of particular subjectivities. Ong (1996), for instance, argues that cultural citizenship involves processes of ‘subjectification’, through which Asian immigrants to California from varied backgrounds make themselves in accordance with hegemonic national conceptions of race and ethnicity. French (2009) examines the formation of new communities, ethnic boundaries and identities in Brazil. Specific legal regimes offer preferential rights to favoured identity groups – first indigenous communities, and later the descendants of escaped slaves. These regimes created a context in which practices and narratives that were initially adopted in response to legal considerations quickly gained new importance as the means through which communities produce and express new identities. Postero (2007) explores the role of Guarani political organisations, land titling processes and NGO interventions in the production of new indigenous subjectivities under a regime of neoliberal multiculturalism in the lowlands of Bolivia. Lazar (2008) describes citizenship as a local practice, in which relationships to a national government are mediated through a series of ‘nested affiliations’. Constructing and participating in these nested affiliations is one of the principal practices through which vecinos ¹ of the city of El Alto, Bolivia create a sense of belonging to a collective. Through these citizenship practices, vecinos simultaneously construct the community and make themselves as subjects. All of these works share an interest in the relationship between belonging in a local political community and national discourses, practices and institutions involved in producing particular subjectivities. In this paper, I address ways that this process of ‘constructing community’ through participation in nested affiliations intersects with certain ethnoracial sensibilities. In this local context, various visions of the community as an ethnoracially marked social space are produced and contested, through a process of making claims to belonging within the community.

In Bolivia, as in many countries in Latin America, processes of citizenship and belonging have historically hinged on questions of race and ethnicity, in which an ideology of mestizaje, or race-mixing between Indians and whites, has played a particularly important role (Larson, 2004; Wade, 2010; Whitten, 2007). Colonial and early republican political regimes aimed to maintain clear divisions between Indians and whites (Harris, 1995; Larson, 2004; Silverblatt, 2005). In the early 20th century, efforts to construct a Bolivian national identity reinterpreted the idea of mestizaje, in a more positive light. According to this new interpretation, rather than muddling the boundaries necessary for the maintenance of a clear social order, the mixing of Indian and white races would combine the best characteristics of both and produce a new, modern national character. The goal was to create a third, uniquely Bolivian, racial type, homogenous enough that it would serve as the basis for a uniform Bolivian nation, sufficiently white as to be modern, and yet still rooted to a (national) place (Gildner, 2012; Sanjines, 2004; Weston, 1968). The Yungas region of La Paz – home to my research site, the town of Chicaloma – with its large Afro-Bolivian population, fits awkwardly into this national discourse, and the presence of Afro-Bolivians has usually been ignored or treated as a local anomaly.

A handful of authors have addressed this issue by emphasising the presence of Afrodescendant populations throughout Bolivian history, particularly during the colonial period, and the contributions of blacks to the Bolivian nation (Angola, 2003, 2010; Bridikhina, 2007; Brockington, 2006; Lipski, 2006, 2008; Olson, 2010). Busdiecker (2006, 2009) takes a more detailed approach to the problems that the presence of Afro-Bolivians in the Yungas presents for Bolivian identity at a national level. As she looks at the position of blacks within the discourse of mestizaje, Busdiecker identifies certain discursive patterns that locate blackness in the social geography of the Yungas region of La Paz. The warm, subtropical valleys that make up the Yungas are home to many Afro-Bolivian communities, and as Busdiecker argues, are frequently reconstituted as ‘African’ or ‘Like Africa’, and therefore are a ‘natural place’ for blacks in Bolivia. Discursively constructing the Yungas as an ‘African’ space excludes the region from the national whole and allows blackness to belong there without threatening the overarching discourse of a mestizo national identity in Bolivia.

In this paper, I look at local, rather than national, discourses and practices. I focus on the intersection between ethnoracial sensibilities and processes of ‘self-making’ such as those described in recent ethnographies of citizenship. In doing so, this paper shows that self-making is accompanied by a process of community-making that Lazar calls ‘constructing community’ (Lazar, 2008). This process includes not only practices such as producing administrative structures that build and maintain infrastructure, provide services within the town and mediate interactions with the state, but also making claims about the very constitution of that community. ² Members making these claims strive to represent the community as a social space in such a way as to better match their own circumstances and personal histories. That is, they strive to remake the social space in their image. At stake in these contestations over the nature of the community is access resources from the series of nested affiliations that organise communal life; those who are able to stake a stronger claim to belonging face favourable conditions in their petitions for services or interventions. Those who are not able to make such convincing claims to belonging find that they have more limited access to the resources distributed through these local nested affiliations. This local conception of belonging is markedly different from a conception of citizenship as a rights-bearing status bestowed equally on all full members. It bears a resemblance to the ethnoracially marked idea of membership in Andean indigenous communities described by Canessa (1998). This conception of belonging focuses on a process of becoming a full person, which can only happen through continued performance of obligations and in relation to other members of the community. But while Canessa states with confidence that ‘the people of Pocobaya were quite clear that’ a particular person does or does not belong, in Chicaloma what is contested is precisely who the ‘people of Chicaloma’ are. That is, the practices through which people make claims that they belong in a social space simultaneously produce an idea of that social space. This conception of ‘constructing social space’ resists clear delimitations of inclusion and exclusion, and yields an unstable and fluid context in which actors’ relative position vis-à-vis each other and their community – and, in fact the very constitution of that community – are in constant flux. It is not only an individual’s position that is unstable or subject to contestation, but also the community as a social space.

Personal histories, histories of place

Telling histories is one practice through which individuals construct – and contest the construction of – Chicaloma as a social space. In this section, I analyse the practice of telling histories as a process of constructing the community as a social space. In particular, telling histories frequently marks that social space according to certain ethnoracial sensibilities, and at the same time locates the teller within that space. That is, telling histories is a practice of constructing the community as a social space in which the teller is well positioned to claim to belong. The most commonly repeated explanation for the presence of Afro-Bolivians in the Yungas tells that enslaved Africans were originally brought to the mines of Potosí, were found ill suited to work in the cold highlands and were therefore taken to work in the Yungas, where the climate and landscape is more similar to Africa (Busdiecker, 2006, 2009). Whether or not this history carries elements of truth, by the time Bolivia enacted the agrarian reform in 1953, there was a significant Afro-Bolivian population on haciendas ³ scattered across the Yungas and the region was firmly established in the national imagination as an Afro-Bolivian space (Busdiecker, 2006). This was particularly true in Chicaloma canton, where most of the original peasant labourers – referred to locally as colonos – on nearly all of the haciendas were the descendants of enslaved Africans.

In the decades following the agrarian reform, former colonos began to build new homes in town and abandon their houses on former hacienda estates. One of the major shifts that followed in the wake of the agrarian reform (and again after the neoliberal reforms of 1985) was increased migration throughout Bolivia, particularly from rural areas to the cities, and from the high plains to the lowlands. In most of the Yungas, the agrarian reform only redistributed the land that colonos were actually cultivating, and not land that was either under cultivation by the owner or uncultivated, leaving a significant area in the hands of landowners. After the reform, hacienda owners were newly short of labour as the former colonos found it in their interest to cultivate their own land rather than that of the hacienda for a wage (Leons, 1967, 1977b). In response to this shortage, several hacienda owners recruited migrants from the highlands, either as caretakers or labourers. They often paid these labourers by granting them title to some of the land that remained under their control or the right to cultivate such land. These labourers recruited members of their villages in the highlands to migrate also. In some cases, they then sued the hacienda owner under Bolivian laws of adverse possession and won title to the land (Leons, 1970, 1977b).

I heard versions of this history repeated from various individuals in Chicaloma, but with key differences of detail. For instance, Jorge, ⁴ an Afro-Bolivian and the general secretary of one of the local coca-growers, unions, told me a variant of that history in which enslaved Africans escaped from Potosí during the earliest uprisings of the wars of independence and made their own way to the Yungas. This history grants Afro-Bolivians agency both through their resistance to enslavement, and in their role as original inhabitants of the town of Chicaloma. It paints Afro-Bolivians as founders and active participants in the construction of Chicaloma – and the Bolivian nation as a whole – from its earliest days. Jorge goes on to describe the suffering of blacks as forced labour on the hacienda. He described the conditions for colonos, including the weekly labour tenancy requirement of three days of work on hacienda lands and rotating shifts providing domestic services to the household. He argues that their participation in the Chaco War and the revolution of ’52 underlie their claims to the land that they currently farm and the organisations that manage that territory. ‘Once [our grandparents] began to form sindicatos, they began to demand their rights’.

Like other Afro-Bolivians, Jorge frames their rights to access to land in terms of reparations for this history of suffering and struggle. Jorge uses the words ‘grandparents’ and ‘parents’ in a particularly ambiguous manner throughout his descriptions, hovering between referring to specific people who organised and managed the sindicato in its early days and applying it to a general idea of ‘ancestors’, who arrived as slaves from Africa and worked in the mines and on the haciendas. By blending an encompassing – and ethnoracially African – history of his town, with his family’s history, he makes a claim about Chicaloma as a social and geographic space that is at once ethnoracially marked as ancestrally African and to which he is personally connected through the actions of individual ancestors. While on the face of it, he is telling a history of the place, he simultaneously claims to belong within the community, both on the grounds of an ethnoracial identity and on the grounds of a particular family history. Further, by emphasising the importance of sindicatos, he claims a particularly important role within that social space, as the general secretary of his sindicato.

Other black residents told histories that focused on the means by which migrants gained access to land in Chicaloma in terms of a usurpation of a rightful inheritance. For instance, Mateo, the former general secretary of a different sindicato and current corregidor ⁵ of Chicaloma, tells the story of how this happened on one hacienda in some detail. In his telling, he cites the sacrifice of those who suffered in forced labour on the hacienda as a basis for a moral argument to ownership of that land. For Mateo, the children of those who suffered in the hacienda have a right to that land through inheritance, but this right was usurped through legal trickery by migrants who arrived from the highlands.

The owner … gave them a piece of land to work. And so [one of them] goes back to his town and brings two more back from his town. He comes down here again, and he keeps bringing more, keeps bringing more, keeps bringing more. That’s how the people from the highlands got here … He’s still doing it. And all that our colono brothers should have been able to use, is being used by someone else, someone who didn’t even suffer on the hacienda. That should be for the children of the parents who sacrificed their lives on that hacienda … But there aren’t any children who use it. They are other people who come from somewhere else.

In contrast, the children of these immigrants occupy a more ambivalent place. According to Mateo, they were born in Chicaloma and have become his friends. As he recognises, the children of migrants can make legitimate – if incompletely so – claims to be vecinos of Chicaloma. They can make claims belonging based on their birth, their social relationships to other people in town and their status as vecinos. But since they lack a connection to an ancestral history of suffering on the hacienda, those claims are incomplete. These children of immigrants who live in town are simultaneously newcomers and vecinos: urban, but not rooted. In her work on El Alto, Lazar suggests that vecino is a category of belonging based on place rather than ethnicity. She refers to it as a kind of ‘urban citizenship’ which emphasises territoriality rather than ethnicity. This form of citizenship is ‘corporate, rooted and physical’ (Lazar, 2008). In Chicaloma, as in El Alto, one of the key distinctions is between urban and rural. For instance, Aymara migrants from the highlands who live in communities within the county, but outside the urban centre of Chicaloma, and who do not participate in the nested affiliations that organise life in town, are not commonly referred to as vecinos. Those immigrants who do live in town will frequently be referred to as vecinos, though the term intersects with a process of constructing the community as a social space that is marked according to specific (and contested) ethnoracial values. Nevertheless, on its own, claiming to be a vecino functions only incompletely as a grounds for claiming belonging in Chicaloma. In order to make more complete claims to belonging, immigrants contest the ethnoracial sensibilities associated with Chicaloma as a social space.

Some immigrants tell a different history, one which evokes a different set of ethnoracial values and contests the constitution of Chicaloma as an Afro-Bolivian social space. For instance, Justo, whose parents arrived in Chicaloma from near Tiwanaku on the shores of Lake Titicaca, cites an earlier history of indigenous, and particularly Inca, presence in the region. Where Jorge claims that the town was a refuge for escaped slaves, Justo cites archaeological material and historical documents as evidence that Incaic nomads occupied the town of Chicaloma before the Spanish conquest. He asserts that the town was known as ‘Chicanoma’, an abridgement of the Spanish word ‘nómada’ or ‘nomad’, before the Spanish brought Afro-Bolivian slaves from the mines in Potosí to the Yungas. His history contests the construction of Chicaloma as an Afro-Bolivian space by suggesting that indigenous people have an earlier claim to it. He further argues that haciendas – and hacienda owners – existed in the Yungas prior to the arrival of blacks and attributes their arrival to the designs of Spanish mine and hacienda owners, rather than to the agency of blacks themselves. Justo uses this history to counteract histories – such as Jorge's above – that construct Chicaloma as a black space, which the descendants of colonos have shaped through their own work. By telling a different history, which evokes a different set of ethnoracial sensibilities, Justo is contesting that construction and working to produce a different one. This history aims to shift the ethnoracial marking of the community from an African space – an historical anomaly within the mestizo/Indian national space – to one that fits with the indigenous nationalism that marks discourses of national belonging in present-day Bolivia (Albro, 2005; Canessa, 2012; Gustafson, 2002; Mamani Ramírez, 2011). These present-day presentations of Bolivian national identity tend to shift away from addressing indigenous peoples as discrete, ethnically distinct populations, and reframe Bolivia as an indigenous nation. This indigenous nationalism is based on a generalised conception of indigeneity, though, rather than on particular connections to a specific community or social space through particular social relations. Likewise, Justo’s claims make no reference to particular social relations – either human or non-human – that occur within that social space. Instead they refer to a vague notion of an Incaic past: distant ancestors who are unknown and unknowable, rather than named places or spirits. These competing histories mark Chicaloma according to different ethnoracial sensibilities, in which residents are differently positioned to make claims to belonging.

As these migrants’ claims work to unsettle the construction of Chicaloma as a black space, Mateo and other black Chicalomeños fear a gradual loss of African identity through race mixture and cultural change. While we discussed the history of black participation in Bolivia, I mentioned to Mateo that during the colonial period there were documented populations of blacks in numerous towns, in what is now Bolivia. I wondered aloud how it had happened that these towns had lost that trace of black identity while Chicaloma and the other Yungas towns had kept it. Mateo responded with some sadness that he feared a similar fate for Chicaloma:

And someday the same thing is going to happen with Chicaloma. Some years from now there won’t be blacks. There won’t be Afro-Bolivians. The few of us that are here will be lost. There aren’t any. The same thing will happen in our town. And Chicaloma is known internationally for black culture, right? And it won’t exist …. Anybody could arrive in Chicaloma, looking for an Afro-Bolivian and they’ll find fifty Aymaras in the street and ten Afro-Bolivians.

In her work on Turkish migration to Germany, Mandel considers an idea of deracination in place, in which the nature or makeup of a place changes to the point where people can begin to feel rootless without having ever moved. She describes Berliners who

have been equally affected by change though having never left home; instead home abandoned them: their natal country vanished to be replaced by the once adversarial neighbour. Can we think of former East Germans nostalgic for their old, seemingly certain lives, as living in a psychological or social diaspora, as having been deracinated from their homeland only to find themselves living an alien life on the self-same street? (Mandel, 2008)

Below, I track some of the practices through which Afro-Bolivians in Chicaloma perform an ‘African’ identity in relation to national (and international) discourses of racial identity. These discourses not only mark the Yungas as an ethnoracially ‘African’ social space (Busdiecker, 2006, 2009), but also establish the terms by which ethnoracial identity is normally expressed in a national or international context (Rahier, 2008; Wade, 1995, 2010; Warren and Jackson, 2002).

Football and Saya

At the conclusion of our taped interview, I asked Mateo whether he had anything he wanted to add. He immediately mentioned the Saya – the Afro-Bolivian drumming rhythm, singing and dance commonly associated with an African inheritance – and recounted with pride his efforts to recover drums from older relatives, learn to play them and re-found a group of musicians in Chicaloma. ⁶ Here again, Mateo tells histories that simultaneously mark Chicaloma according to certain ethnoracial sensibilities, and places himself within this space, emphasising his social connections within the community. In his telling, his efforts to revive the Saya involved learning how to play from older residents and forming a group of well-trained players among his contemporaries and younger residents. During the 1990s, political organisations representing Afro-Bolivians also began to focus on the Saya to emphasise their unique ethnic identity. For these movements the Saya, a dance practiced in Afro-Bolivian communities, based on complex rhythmic drumming, sung couplets and energetic dancing served as a tool for representing and organising Afro-Bolivian identity (Angola, 2003, 2008; Busdiecker, 2006, 2009; Spedding, 1995). Those who participate often emphasise an explicit link to their African roots. Several vecinos spoke animatedly of their participation as drummers or dancers in political events in the city of La Paz, to demand recognition for Afro-Bolivians as an ethnic group. In Bolivia, as in other parts of the Andes, specific dances are frequently recognised as referents for or expressions of affiliation with a certain community, especially for indigenous communities, but also for specific groups of urban mestizos who use dance to represent and construct themselves as a group within that context (Albó and Preiswerk, 1986), and as such, dance is a site of claim-making and contestation, both locally and nationally (French, 2006, 2009; Mendoza-Walker, 2000). In this sense, Saya is a logical tool for representing Afro-Bolivian identity both among blacks and in wider, national contexts. Yet Saya is remarkably different from other kinds of dances performed in the highlands of Bolivia, most of which involve lines of marching dancers (Lazar, 2008), and expresses an identity that is at once Bolivian and foreign.

Within Chicaloma, Saya allows certain individuals to claim personal, social and historical connections in the town as well as a broader African culture. When younger players remark on the drums that they have inherited from specific family members, or recollect with fondness an older relative’s favourite song, these remarks constitute a claim to belonging based on their personal connection to a long local history. Mateo told several stories about drums he was able to recover and the men he learned to play from:

After our grandparents died, the Saya almost didn’t exist. Thanks to a friend, Paulo Álvarez, we talked and tried to unite ourselves. We went to find drums … I went to bring a drum from Silala, near Yalica. We went to bring a Drum from Taco. We got drums here from Don Augustín Ballavian, from Don Juan Pedrero, and from Don Ángel Pérez.

After telling me of these efforts, Mateo invited me to accompany him and the Chicaloma football team and Saya group to a match in the town of Cañamina, some three hours distant. On the appointed day, the team from Chicaloma was welcomed with the sound of fireworks, a receiving line and confetti. The programme included a flag raising, the national anthem, a moment of silence and three football matches: women, seniors and the men’s first team. In a moment of confusion, the head teacher of Cañamina announced that the Chicaloma team would play a Saya right before the main game. As they scrambled to retrieve drums and prepared to play, the head teacher spoke animatedly about the Saya as a national, and even international heritage, and an important token of Chicaloma’s Afro-Bolivian identity. The team from Chicaloma gathered their drums and organised a circle to play and sing a few couplets. The performance – in a circle, without separate dancers, and in football uniforms – seemed to have been something other than what the head teacher expected, though, and as soon as it was over he apologetically offered that there would be another chance to see the Saya, including the women’s dance, in the plaza after the game. The head teacher’s understanding of how a dance would be performed drew on the Andean traditions of dances: marching lines of elaborately costumed dancers performing specific steps and routines, differentiated by their gender and accompanied by a band, rather than an informal and spontaneous expression of Afro-Bolivian identity. Following the games, the Chicaloma delegation performed Saya again, in the plaza as requested, though still in a circle, without costumes and without formal dance steps.

This excursion highlighted a connection between outward representations of Chicaloma, football and Saya that reinforce a particularly Afro-Bolivian local character or identity. At football tournaments throughout the Yungas, the Chicaloma team is accompanied by a Saya group that drums in celebration of goals and plays throughout the match. These tournaments are an important representation of the town within the region, and men of all ages speak with pride of their youthful accomplishments on the pitch. Rahier, in his analysis of the contradictions that black players on the national football team pose for the place of blackness ‘within/outside’ Ecuador’s (officially) multicultural society, notes that

Participation in international sports competitions often provides ‘national populations’ … with occasions to enact the official understanding of ‘national identity’, as well as to reflect upon and revisit what and who is included in, or excluded from, the ‘national character’, and why. (Rahier, 2008)

Both Saya and football – and particularly the conjunction of the two – not only support the discursive reproduction of Chicaloma as a black space, but also enable claims to belonging based on performance in these arenas. Saya and football are both discursively black spaces, according to – local and general – stereotypes of blacks as musically gifted and naturally athletic. That they serve as the public representations of the town to neighbouring towns and throughout the country establishes an outwardly black identity for Chicaloma. Internally, both arenas also carry specific ethnoracial value. An older white resident – the son of the town’s first schoolteacher – played football in his youth, but remarked that he ‘stood out like a mole’. Still, participating in these activities – particularly in representation of Chicaloma – allows those who do to make claims to belonging. Athletes and musicians highlight their rootedness in the community of Chicaloma. Mateo’s assertions that he is a central figure in the revitalisation of Saya in Chicaloma emphasises his rootedness in the area, his commitment to the culture of the town, his family connections and a grounded social knowledge of the region. Playing football, or having played football, allows athletes to make similar claims, by bragging about their accomplishments and telling stories of their teammates and the tournaments they travelled to. That is, playing football and Saya constitute claims to belong by simultaneously emphasising the rootedness of the player and constructing the community as an Afro-Bolivian social space. These claims emphasise the match between the claimant and the ethnoracial composition of Chicaloma as a social space and simultaneously establish their personal connections to that space. These practices of performing ethnicity through sport and dance – and telling stories about it – are part of a process of constructing Chicaloma as an ethnoracially marked social space. In the sections below, I turn to focus on the series of ‘nested affiliations’ that organise community life and the allocation of important social and economic resources. Here again, ethnoracial sensibilities intersect (though not necessarily explicitly so) with claims to belonging in and access to these institutions and the resources that are distributed through them.

Nested affiliations and contested belonging

Several nested affiliations (Lazar, 2008) organise social life in the town of Chicaloma. As in much of Bolivia, school and neighbourhood committees play important roles alongside political parties, local government offices and a variety of other organisations. During the time I was in Chicaloma, I had opportunities to spend time with the potable water cooperative and several sindicatos. On my first day of fieldwork in Chicaloma, I arrived to find the town nearly empty. I walked through the empty streets until I finally found someone who pointed me in the direction of the school. Nearly all of the vecinos were sitting in the concrete schoolyard, clustered in the shade of the classroom buildings. I arrived as the meeting was closing, and the officials of the potable water cooperative were coordinating the details of the following days communal work responsibilities and discussing the cost of new connections to the potable water system. At another meeting several months later, vecinos discussed everything from the mother’s day celebrations at the local school to communal work schedules to the band for the upcoming patron saint’s day festival. Public health representatives from the hospital in Chicaloma attended, in order to discuss the performance of the doctor who staffed Chicaloma’s health clinic. While meetings of the sindicatos or neighbourhood committees are forums for subgroups of the town, a meeting of the water committee draws the whole town together, to such an extent that it is the place to conduct any business that involves the whole town.

The cooperative also serves as a point of reference, by which individuals can express their rootedness and involvement in the community. When the infrastructure was constructed, in the 1980s and 1990s, families contributed a certain number of days of labour in exchange for their share in the cooperative. Individuals tell the stories of their participation – jokes they played on their friends, sagas of the suffering they endured finishing the project, etc. – in this infrastructure construction project often, and with great enthusiasm. These stories serve to reinforce a claim to belonging, based on rootedness in the town through the teller’s relationships with other vecinos, their intimacy with the history of the place and their record of having performed as good members of the community. The physical infrastructure, alongside the foundation of a bureaucratic entity that represents and organises the community, forms a pivotal moment in the construction of a sense of community in the town of Chicaloma. Together, they are viewed as signs of the town’s progress and development, and its capacity to lift itself up. ⁷ The potable water cooperative continues to serve, not only as an organisation to provide services to the town, but also as a site where vecinos are ‘constructing a sense of community in part by organizing themselves to develop their [town]’ (Lazar, 2008). One way that vecinos construct a sense of community in relation to the water cooperative is by making claims about who has rights to access resources through it. Here again, personal histories of a long-term and intimate involvement with the cooperative allow the teller to claim a fundamental role in this process, allowing those people who participated in its inception a more straightforward claim to access these resources. Telling stories about experiences on the work gangs building the potable water system are not simply stories. They connect individuals to a social space.

Sindicatos also play an important role in constructing community. Since coca cultivation, transport and sale is tightly controlled, agricultural unions in coca-growing areas take on a particularly important role in the organisation of production and trade. The Departmental Association of Coca Producers (ADEPCOCA) plays a particularly important role in this process: it is the organisation that licenses individual sindicatos, issues identity cards to producers and runs the legal market for coca in La Paz. ADEPCOCA was founded in the early 1980s to allow producers a legal path to transport and trade coca (Spedding, 1997). This legal regime, which aims to restrict expansion of coca plantations and gradually reduce the hectares in production, heavily favours producers from communities that have historically produced coca, the so-called traditional producers. As in the case described by French (2009), restricted access to these economic possibilities generates tension and division within the community. The pressure on sindicatos to restrict their membership, combined with the preferential treatment for traditional producers has led to tensions over membership that often hinge on questions of belonging. Negotiations are fraught and often deeply personal. Individuals deploy claims to belonging that depend not only on their own participation in a given sindicato, or descent from a particular hacienda, but also on an entire range of shifting affiliations, practices, discourses and histories.

Jorge spoke to me about conditions for colonos, including the weekly labour tenancy requirement of three days of work on hacienda lands and rotating shifts providing domestic services to the household. Jorge, like other Afro-Bolivians, refers to these experiences as a fundamental to claims to belonging, and views the sindicato as an inheritance from his grandparents, through his parents to his generation. For Jorge, these claims of inheritance focus particularly on the sindicato and its role in the history of suffering and struggle:

Our grandparents, more than anyone else, worked on the haciendas. They worked three days a week and the rest of the week they worked for themselves … This sindicato comes from our grandparents. Now our grandparents have died, and only a few of our parents are still here.

This assertion is at odds with the historical patterns of the first decades after the agrarian reform. Leons suggests that political organisation through the sindicatos was the domain of Indian populations, and the constitution of the town and the formation of work groups were the domain of blacks (Leons, 1970, 1977a, 1977b).

In Chicaloma canton, blacks formed syndicates on their own properties as required. However, these local syndicates never were incorporated effectively into the syndicate hierarchy. These local syndicates lapsed as organs of local self-government as soon as land titles were obtained or the likelihood diminished that they easily would be … Estrangement of blacks as a group from the syndicate organization played a part … Blacks, indifferent to syndicate participation, focused their political energies not on the former haciendas but on the village of Chicaloma itself. (Leons, 1978: 490)

A sindicato meeting

While I was in Chicaloma, the sindicato Esmeralda ⁸ – the same sindicato of which Jorge was general secretary – was in the midst of processes that brought these issues to the fore. The sindicato was required to rewrite its bylaws in order to apply for legal personhood and re-register with ADEPCOCA. At the same time it was consolidating its list of members in preparation for the periodic process of issuing new producer’s cards. Both of these were contentious problems which raised questions about belonging, both in an ideal sense in relation to the requirements that would be written into the bylaws and in real terms when faced with the decision to accept or reject particular individuals. These issues were both discussed in the same meeting, and a neat distinction between the two is rarely apparent in the comments of those present. The question of whether a particular person had carried out their obligations sufficiently to merit renewed membership necessarily draws on idealised notions of what a person should contribute to the community as a sindicato member, while questions about what criteria should be written into the bylaws brought out examples and accusations regarding specific cases and individuals. Several people with ties to the comunidad were interested in being enrolled in the sindicato and several others were accused of not having fulfilled their social and economic obligations as members of the sindicato. ⁹ There was, therefore, significant tension over who should or should not be struck from the sindicato’s rolls and also over what the general criteria for membership should be. A set of criteria based on residence in the community was impossible. The sindicatos were initially formed as a means to organise former colonos once the haciendas were disbanded. Once people moved to town, though, there was no longer a neat relationship between comunidad – in the sense of a place where a collection of families live – and sindicato. There is still a tendency for sindicatos to represent the descendants of former colonos of a given hacienda, but there is also a great deal of flexibility: new migrants have entered sindicatos and people do sometimes change their sindicato affiliation. Further, as land has changed hands through inheritance, marriage and sale, families may own plots in the territory of several former haciendas but will belong to only one sindicato.

Processes of community-making and self-making were on prominent display at the meeting. As the debates about member rolls and bylaws dragged on into the afternoon, various speakers called for members to respect the new bylaws and meet the obligations that they stipulated in order to build a better sindicato. For instance, one member argued that members should respect the new bylaws, saying ‘All of us who are in the sindicato should go out and work, not just a few of us … This way the sindicato will go well, will succeed’. Others argued that it was the role of the sindicato to punish, or even cast out, those members who did not comply with all of the rules. One member argued, ‘if they want to be in this comunidad, from the moment that they left off, up to this moment, they should pay their dues, their work, all of that. They should pay up. Then easy they can be with us in this comunidad’. Both arguments express ‘a strong conception of active responsibility toward the community’ (Lazar, 2008), in order to construct the sindicato/comunidad, and themselves as members. The first emphasises that members construct the community, while the second emphasises the role of the sindicato in producing its members as citizen-subjects.

Nevertheless, these moral arguments about contribution to the development of the sindicato were complicated by notions of belonging whenever the discussion moved from the general question of how members of a comunidad should behave to the specific question of what a particular individual ought to do in order to maintain their position or be added to the rolls. For the descendants of former colonos, these claims to belonging were relatively straightforward. More contentious issues arose in the cases of the children of migrants who were born in Chicaloma or who had arrived at a young age. Several of the fees expected from new members were graduated: immigrants were expected to pay a higher fee than those who were from Chicaloma. One man, who had arrived as a young child marshalled the support of members of the sindicato’s central committee to advocate on his behalf so that he could pay the reduced fee for local residents. Children who had been born in Chicaloma but were living in La Paz while they pursued their studies raised other questions. Parents making claims on behalf of their absent children based those claims on the fact that their children were born in Chicaloma. For instance, one migrant pleaded intently that, because his adolescent children were born in Chicaloma, they shouldn’t be struck from the rolls, even though they were living in La Paz and had not participated in work days or paid fines. The arguments deployed in these cases of particular individuals called on claims to belonging, rather than on an active responsibility for constructing the community. While not contradictory, each kind of argument draws its moral force from a different source, the self-making of good citizen-subjects on one hand, as opposed to rootedness of personal history and social relations on the other. These assertions of long-term residence in Chicaloma are not necessarily based on a direct link to a given hacienda, but on a broader claim to belonging within the social space of the town. Those who can marshal the full weight of longstanding social relationships and personal histories of participation in producing the town as a social space are able to produce much more convincing claims to belonging in any sindicato. Those who played football in their day, those who play Saya, those who participated in the water cooperative work gangs, those who tell stories about their parents’ lives as colonos on any hacienda are better positioned to claim belonging within the sindicato. This means that, even when they fail to attend work days, or skip out on their other obligations, they are not threatened with having their names struck from the rolls.

Francisco, a former officer of the sindicato, called attention to this problem in a discussion about the organisation’s bylaws. On the one hand, he identifies the kinds of discourses involved in the self-making according to the ideals established in local discourses of community. On the other, he notes the value of claims based on rootedness and personal history:

Think about it. Sometimes we get fired up about something and we say, “Compañeros, the vecino who doesn’t comply should pay 1,000.” And … like sheep, [we all go running off], and we vote “yes”. But when it’s our turn to pay that “yes”, we say “No compañeros. How can it be 1,000? I was born here.”

Yet there is a further complication hidden in Francisco's comment. All of the sindicato members who made public claims to be considered members of the community were immigrants or the children of immigrants. The descendants of the original colonos of the hacienda rarely even need to make these kinds of claims to belonging explicitly. Their claim to belonging in the community of Chicaloma and the sindicato does not need to be expressed to be valid. The migrant whose children were in La Paz recognised that he could not plead on their behalf based on their fulfilment of social and economic obligations to the sindicato. Instead he argued that they should not be struck from the roles because they were born in Chicaloma. But, as he grew increasingly agitated, it became clear that he worried his argument might not be convincing. Claiming belonging involves something more significant and more nuanced than simply being born in Chicaloma. With valuable social and economic resources at stake, certain people’s claims are less likely to draw contestation than others. These tend to be people whose personal histories allow them to claim descent from the original colonos of the haciendas, who have longstanding social relationships in the town and the region, and who participate in activities that represent the town on a regional and national stage. As we have seen, these are also people who claim descent from African ancestors, whose social relations link them to other Afro-Bolivians from the region, and who perform an ethnically ‘African’ identity in the Yungas and beyond. That is, the practices through which individuals make claims to belong simultaneously operate to construct Chicaloma as an ethnoracially marked social space. These constructions are hardly permanent: they have been contested in the past and continue to be contested in the present. Mateo’s anxiety that the shifting demographics of Chicaloma carries more weight than simple sentimentality. As the demographics shift (and with them, the ethnoracial constitution of Chicaloma) his social relations and personal history may lose their effectiveness in claims to belonging and the attendant access to social and economic resources. As Justo tells and retells the history of ‘Chicanoma’, he too contests the ethnoracial constitution of Chicaloma, and works to construct a social space in which he is better placed to claim these social and economic resources.

Conclusions

This article situates claims to belonging within the context of recent literature that addresses citizenship as a process of ‘self-making’, rather than simply a legal status that carries a set of rights and responsibilities. I have described practices of making claims to belonging that work to simultaneously produce citizen-subjects and construct their community as a social space. The self-making involved in citizenship is not simply a process of fitting into an externally imposed or pre-existing legal or social framework (French, 2009; Ong, 1996). Rather, as Lazar (2008) shows, citizenship practices include constructing a sense of community and a series of affiliations in which those processes of ‘self-making’ are carried out. In Chicaloma, the social space of the community is neither a pre-existing construct in which people make themselves as suitable subjects, nor established according to some national discourse about social geography, nor constructed as an idealised form as a result of self-making and community-making processes. Rather, it is fluid, unsettled and open to continuous interpretation and contestation.

Claims to belonging that construct the town as an ethnoracially marked social space operate in relation to national discourses of ethnoracial identity. In fact it may be that these practices of making claims to belonging are particularly visible in Chicaloma precisely because local ethnoracial sensibilities fit so awkwardly with discourses of identity in a national sphere. Performing ethnicity through music, dance and football in Chicaloma fits awkwardly with the expectations for how dance should be performed, even if it is a common means for performing ethnic identity. Saya emphasises the African ancestry of Chicaloma, but it also evokes national and international stereotypes of African drumming and of blacks as musically and athletically gifted (Rahier, 2008). When Mateo and Jorge tell histories of enslaved African ancestors in the mines of Potosí or their descendants labouring on the haciendas, they evoke common ethnoracial sensibilities that mark Chicaloma as an Afro-Bolivian space, even though they may not necessarily make explicit reference to race. Jorge and Mateo’s histories repeat and modify an understanding of the Yungas as an anomaly: an ‘African’ social space within the country, where an Afro-Bolivian population can exist without threat to the Indian or mestizo national whole (Busdiecker, 2006, 2009). Justo, by telling a different history, contests this construction of Chicaloma as an ‘African’ social space, and evokes a different set of ethnoracial sensibilities. Justo’s history of Incaic presence in the region evokes an indigenous national identity. This discourse of national indigenous identity refers to a generalised and glorified Incaic past, rather than particular social relations or personal history (Canessa, 2006; Greene, 2007; Gustafson, 2002), but it is nonetheless powerful. Justo’s history aims to subsume the Yungas within the national – indigenous and mestizo – social space. Each of these histories draws on broader discourses of social space within the nation to make claims about the nature or constitution of the community, but they also work for the person making the claim. That is, those making claims to belonging do so in ways that construct the community in their image.

In this context, Mateo’s anxiety over the demographic shifts may make more sense, given that it comes from the perspective of someone whose access to social and economic resources – his role as corregidor and his position within his sindicato – depends on the production of Chicaloma as an Afro-Bolivian social space. While the sindicatos serve as links between coca growers, national political parties and the national government, access to them depends on local claims to belonging. These sindicatos are responsible for issuing producers’ cards, maintaining the rolls and issuing permits for transporting and selling coca. They channel petitions to the appropriate authorities and make demands on the government when necessary. Though their role has shifted with the national political context – initially serving as a tool for local economic elites to channel resources to their allies, but shifting to gain an important role in organising economic life for all residents of Chicaloma – these sindicatos still play a key role in citizens’ interactions with the national government. It is through these institutions that citizens carry out basic interactions and negotiations with the state, and through which basic services and privileges are distributed. Claims to belonging within the town carry a significant influence on residents’ position with respect to them. They may never be complete or categorical – no individual will be definitively included nor will anyone be authoritatively excluded. This is what induces such anxiety: one’s position is never secured, nor even certain.

In examining the intersection between these processes of community making and the ethnoracial sensibilities at play in Chicaloma, it becomes clear that community making is not simply a process of constructing the institutions, or ‘nested affiliations’ through which members produce and discipline themselves. Rather, community making also involves constructing a social space within which certain people are better positioned to claim belonging than others. Implicit in this argument is the observation that claims to belonging are as much about excluding certain others as they are about ensuring that oneself is included. All of these links between local and national political processes occur in relation to discourses of identity and exclusion of a threatening other. This process of exclusion occurs on a national level as well as locally. Discourses of mestizaje exclude Afro-Bolivians by discursively marking off the Yungas as an ‘African’ social space, while within Chicaloma, practices that construct Chicaloma as an Afro-Bolivian social space work to exclude Aymara immigrants to the region. The particular conditions and history of each claimant – social relations, personal history, rootedness, race, family, etc. – influence the position from which a person may make these claims, and the strategies that are likely to yield favourable results in each case. Narrating histories that emphasise shared suffering on the haciendas, or dancing Saya at football matches, for instance, not only strengthen certain individuals’ claims to belonging in it, but also construct the community as an ethnoracially marked social space. At the same time, these practices exclude those who cannot participate equally, or who ‘[stand] out like a mole’ when they do.

Said a different way, claims to belonging are political claims. They serve as a proxy in a conflict over the allocation of resources, rights and responsibilities to members of a community, and they do so by making claims about the very constitution of that community. It should be clear that this membership in the community is not rigid, fixed or clearly defined. It cannot be, because the nature of the community itself is not rigid fixed or clearly defined. Belonging is not, therefore, a condition or status that an individual attains. Rather, belonging is a language for making and contesting claims to access social and economic resources and privileges: that is for making and contesting political claims. And Chicaloma is hardly alone in this preoccupation with belonging. When Mandel (2008) cites the ‘constitutional reference to the fiction of the German volk [which provides] the criteria for including or excluding the foreign body’, she is describing a similar process on a national scale. This paper serves as a call to pay attention to ways that such a community – be it a nation or a locality – might be constructed through claims to belonging that simultaneously produce an exclusive social space.